Arguably, the terminal is more general. Pretty much every developer will at some point have significant interactions with a terminal. The same cannot be said for emacs. On top of that, the terminal is a more general-purpose tool than emacs, and it is much less opinionated than emacs (each TUI tends instead to do their own thing, for good or bad).
I think the bottomline is that it's quite natural to delve into TUIs, when needed, whereas emacs requires a bit more of a dedicated interest (I say this as someone whose main driver was emacs for many years, though I've now gone back to (neo)vim).
I think the bottomline is that it's quite natural to delve into TUIs, when needed, whereas emacs requires a bit more of a dedicated interest (I say this as someone whose main driver was emacs for many years, though I've now gone back to (neo)vim).